Are Your Salespeople "Covid Babies?"

I met a salesperson this week who started working in the car business in 2022 during the pandemic. He proudly described himself as a "Covid Baby." I had heard the term before but was curious what he thought it meant. Without skipping a beat he said, "I'm looking forward to getting real training, I've never had to deal with objections and I'm kind of struggling with them."

I was excited that he wanted training but I was a little stunned that he had been working in the car business for 18 months and never had formal training. One of the first things I have salespeople do at the start of training is to write out their sales process. I gave the gentleman a piece of paper and watched as he stared at it with a blank expression. I've seen this expression many times so I said, "Let me get you started, the first step is the Meet and Greet." Now this is a salesperson who averaged about 14 sales per month. He quickly wrote down "Meet and Greet" and said, "I got it, next is qualifying." After struggling for a few minutes, he was able to come up with "test drive" and "negotiate."

I spoke with the GSM who told me the store had a 10-step sales process. This salesperson was able to recall 4 of the 10 steps. I wish this was the exception but after training hundreds of salespeople, I can tell you that this is very common. Imagine how many more vehicles this salesperson could sell if he knew the sales process forward and backward. How many steps are being skipped every day?

Let's face it, Covid made us lazy. We need to get back to the basics. Carvana averaged $6,432 per unit last quarter. There are obviously a lot of factors that go into that number but their sales process is the foundation. No matter where a customer purchases a vehicle in the Carvana network, they will be put through the exact same sales process. We need to make certain that our sales teams are executing the same process with every customer. No more skipped steps and no more Covid Babies!

If you need help getting your team up to speed to compete in today's competitive market, let's talk. - https://meetings.hubspot.com/mwarwick